CROW 2016 - Constrained and Reactive Objects Workshop

The Constrained and Reactive Objects Workshop (CROW) invites papers that present research results related to using constraints and reactive programming in combination or integrated with imperative and object-oriented systems. This research area has recently received increasing interest again. Object-constraint, constraint-reactive, constraint-imperative systems and others were proposed in response to challenges posed by, for example, the requirements for applications to work across different devices and form-factors, to provide best-effort computing in the face of unreliable devices and networks, and to more fully utilise HPC technology. However, many questions remain. For example, the interactions among constraints, reactive or event-based programming, and mainstream imperative and object-oriented languages are still not well-understood, and different implementation techniques to combine these paradigms are still being explored. The lack of large applications written with combinations of these paradigms means that there is little experience with patterns and tools for such applications, and modularity mechanisms required for such large applications are in their infancy or completely absent.

This workshop is intended to gather researchers working on using constraints or reactive programming in combination with mainstream imperative and object-oriented languages. The goal of this workshop is to present technical research results related to such systems, discuss applications, tools, and patterns used in these systems, and to define better the directions into which this field may evolve by providing overviews of existing work.

Call for Papers

Even though constraint-based and reactive programming are not new concepts, their combination and interaction with more mainstream imperative and object-oriented languages are receiving more and more attention. This workshop is an attempt to gather researchers working on models, languages, and implementations relating these paradigms. We welcome all submissions on language design, implementation, runtime systems, program analysis, software metrics, patterns, modularity principles, case-studies and benchmarks of systems that combine constraint-based or reactive programming with imperative paradigms. Of particular interest are topics from the following areas:

Study of the interactions of constraints and reactive programming with imperative language features such as object-oriented programming, mutable state, encapsulation, modules, or concurrency

Applications and case-studies that showcase examples in which the combination of constraints and reactive programming facilitates systems development

Related fields that constraints and reactive programming can help facilitate, such as self-healing systems, best-effort computing, acceptability-oriented computing, or end-user programming

Authors are invited to submit short position papers or long technical papers. using the ACM SIGPLAN style at 9pt font size (see http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/). Short papers are imited to a maximum of 4 pages, excluding references. Long papers are limited to a maximum of 10 pages, including references. Submissions should not have been previously published nor be under review at other events. All submitted papers will be peer reviewed. Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library (unless the authors wish otherwise). Papers should be submitted via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=crow16.

Workshop Format

The format of the workshop will be that of a mini-conference. Participants can present their work in slots of 30 minutes including Q&A. Because it is often hard to understand the semantics of novel combinations of multiple paradigms as in this workshop just by looking at the code, we also encourage authors to present live demos.

The goal of the workshop is to come to a better understanding of the the field. We hope to use the late afternoon session to draw conclusions from the presented work, and to identify fundamental paradigmatic problems that still need to be resolved to reconcile these different technologies and paradigms.